


They're Only Cookies

by moodyrebelmage



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Baking, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, Kissing Day Festival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 19:22:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8460010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodyrebelmage/pseuds/moodyrebelmage
Summary: A sweets-for-the-sweet holiday has crossed the sea from Kirkwall to Skyhold. Cullen is prepared to treat it like any other day until nostalgia and a dash of profanity convince him to fulfill his promise to spend more time with the Inquisitor.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to take part in [@thesecondsealwrites‘s](http://thesecondsealwrites.tumblr.com/) [Kissing Day Festival](http://thesecondsealwrites.tumblr.com/post/152602101149/thesecondsealwrites-the-seals-kissing-day-and), but it’s loosely based on an idea I had already adopted as a precursor-to-the-first-kiss in Elodie’s canon. I like the Kissing Day setting better than the original idea, so this is your life now, Elodie.

The routine ride to camp was intended to bring a shred of sense into the day, but something more than the familiar sharpness of horse and sweat clung to the air as Cullen cut his path back through the stables. It wasn’t as overt as the red ribbons his soldiers had been so bold as to wear to their morning inspection, but it was there, teasing his nostrils with a hazy sense of home, hidden but unmuddied. It penetrated the breeze that bounced off the wall behind him and whirled back to hit him right between the eyes.

He glanced up at the ramparts. This late in the year, the shadows in the courtyard loitered well after dawn, doubly thick beneath the high walls of the stable’s alcove, but the sun was high enough now that he could see his patrols through the parapets. They were just as indifferent to protocol as the troops in the camp had been, perhaps moreso, as he could see at least one had replaced his hood with a red hat. They clustered in groups around his office door, ostensibly to shield themselves from the mountain winds, but he had spent too much time on the other side of that door not to know that it was just an excuse to chatter about the day’s festivities. 

The frosty rim of his gorget bit into his neck as he contemplated whether or not it was worth it to return to his office.

“ _Maferath’s left buttcheek!_ ” a sharp voice hissed from somewhere nearby. 

It was a slow morning, but Cullen was hardly alone. The shopkeeper across the yard busied herself with the overpriced flowers and scarves she had ordered for the day, and if she had heard the curse, it hadn’t been compelling enough to distract her. Two agents huddled together against the well, preoccupied with some small item wrapped in red. They too ignored it. 

“ _Yaaaaaaaa!_ ” The scream echoed down the stairs to his right, bouncing off the walls of the keep. The soldiers glanced up, spines straightening when they met his gaze. Their feet shuffled with indecision, one of them still turning the little red gift over in her hands. With a sigh, he waved them away and scuffled up the steps. 

“ _The Void take you, you piece of_ -” A hollow clangor rang from behind the planks of the kitchen door, followed by a beat of pregnant silence. “ _Shit._ ”

Honeyed smoke whirled around the shadowed form of the Inquisitor, standing alone in the center of the kitchen, covered in white dust and scrapes of carbon and gripping an empty tray in one hand. At her feet lay a dozen broken cookies. 

“Inquisitor! Is everyth-” A smokey tickle closed his throat, but even as he cleared it from his lungs she gave no sign that she had heard him. “Inquisitor?”

If she was chagrined by his presence, it was masked beneath the flush of irritation already marking her cheeks. She rubbed her brow with the back of her hand and drew in a long breath.

“I, um,” she chuckled, her rueful gaze finally meeting his own. “I didn’t realize… I burned my thumb. And then, while I was distracted, I tripped over this-” Her toe tapped at an empty cauldron sticking out from the end of the table, and she drew in another breath as if swallowing a more colorful word. “- _cauldron_. I’m fine. I’m having a morning, but I’m fine.” 

“I thought you’d already left for Crestwood,” he said. “Where are the cooks?”

“Master Dennet is having Myrtle reshod this morning. We’re leaving after lunch. Rook would kill me if I missed all of his festivities, anyway, and I’d have to be a monster to drag Dorian away before my brother had the opportunity to thoroughly embarrass him.”

“Fair enough,” he chuckled. “Although between you and me, I think Dorian’s just playing coy.”

“Exactly.” 

She surveyed him quietly for a moment, bemusement playing at the corners of her mouth. His breath rose sharp and shallow beneath his plate, a side effect of the clearing smoke exacerbated by her study.

“Anyway,” she continued, “once breakfast was over, the cooks said I had a few hours before they would need the kitchen again. I don’t see how I’ll ever finish now, though.”

“Finish what, exactly?”

Dozens of cookies littered the counters, but none of them appeared to be in much better condition than those on the floor. The center table was a fiasco of flour, dirtied bowls, and empty butter pots. Her gaze followed his, and this time he caught the flush of her cheek as she patted down the frizz crowning her head.

“This Kissing Day thing,” she began, her hand flying up to shush him. “I know you’re not interested. Your nose sort of curls up just there anytime anyone mentions it.” 

“I don’t-” he protested, not because she was wrong, but because it seemed like the polite thing to do. She laughed, waving her hand again.

“It’s fine, Cullen. But my brother has been going on about it for weeks. With my flowers lost to the frost, I was desperate for some other way I could surprise him, and then yesterday I had a thought: wouldn’t it be lovely if each table in the main hall had a little tray of treats for everyone to share? Cookies - simple! Only do you know what else they _don’t_ teach you in the Circle?”

It wasn’t meant to cut, but he felt the pang all the same, the searing reminder of her confinement. 

“ _Cooking_ ,” she pressed on. “Sera offered to help, but she was sleeping like a bear when I checked in on her this morning, so I thought, _how hard can it be?_ I have the recipe, and the rest is just reading.”

She shook her head again, leaving him to draw his own conclusions about how she had gotten to this point. The light from the hearth cast a warm aura around her as she stepped up to the table to set down her tray. Her gaze flitted over the remains of her defeat. 

A chill from the door nipped at the flesh behind his ears, a sharp reminder that he had been on a path before this distraction. _There’s work to do_. The words were at the tip of his tongue, nudging him back to the sanctity of his office. _They’re only cookies_.

“Well, I’m-” he stammered, casting about for a courteous way to excuse himself. “I hope you find a satisfying-” _No_. “I should go.”

With a modest bow, he turned to leave.

“You won’t take one? They’re too ugly to set out and most of them are broken,” she said, “but they taste fine. They’re just going to go to waste.”

Her glib grin wasn’t quite enough to veil the pleading in her voice. _They’re only cookies. There’s work to do._ He had said it a dozen times since the Kissing Day nonsense had begun, every time anyone had prodded him about his plans for the day, but now when he needed them most, when her cheeks were rosy with exertion and her eyes were sparkling with light from the fire, they wouldn’t come out. 

“They’re only cookies,” she said.

He turned away from the door.

She placed one of the few complete biscuits into his palm, but it flaked apart the moment he tried to pick it up. Half of the little hearts scattered before him had already suffered similar fates, and the other half were hardly prettier: flat, over-browned, and crisp with too much butter. He rubbed the crumbs absently between his fingers. He could fix this. 

_There’s work to do_.

“Cullen?”

“I-Could I see the recipe?” he asked. 

Flour dusted off the parchment as she handed it over. 

“When you bake in the mountains,” he explained, “you have to compensate for the thinner air. Even if you followed the recipe exactly, you probably weren’t using enough flour. And it might help to add some cream.”

“You bake?” 

Her heart ever on her sleeve, she made no effort to conceal the hope in her voice, and despite himself his lips twitched with satisfaction.

“My father was a miller,” he explained. “We did a fair amount of baking with our mother. It’s been a long time, though.”

“But you know how to fix this?”

“I... think so.”

“So you’ll help.”

_There’s work to do_. Real work, building her an army steady enough to weather the next attack, strong enough to prevent another Haven and another chance that they might lose her.

“You said we should spend more time together,” she pointed out, cautious, but a little teasing.

“Alright.”

He _had_ been resisting returning to his office, and Josephine had spent the better part of a week reminding him that _festivals were good for morale_. 

Elodie set about reorganizing the chaos on the table before them as he shrugged off his mantle. 

“I’d take the plate off, too, if I were you,” she said. 

He studied her face for any hint that she was teasing him again, but she was collecting a pot of butter and a pitcher of cream from the larder and she didn’t so much as look at him. Beads of sweat were already bubbling along the edge of his hairline, so he tugged his gloves off without protest and began unbuckling his breastplate.

Every bowl in the kitchen had been soiled with her attempts, and it was some time before they had scraped them all out to try again.

“How many were you planning on making?” he asked.

“I think I bit off more than I could handle,” she laughed. “I went in expecting to come out with a dozen for every table in the main hall, but now I think I’d be glad for a solid six that didn’t break when you looked at them.”

“I think we can manage that,” he chuckled. “How about we shoot for a dozen for your brother and a dozen you can take with you on your journey to Crestwood?”

“And none for you?”

Faint streaks of flour peppered her face, revealing thin lines at the corners of her eyes that fanned out like sunbeams when she smiled. 

“Allow me the honor of taking a few of the orphaned ones, and we’ll call it even.”

Her gaze dropped. Perhaps he had misjudged her levity. Her face was blank as she handed him the pot of butter, which he portioned out into two bowls, one for each of them to beat. Then he helped her scoop in the sugar. Elodie fetched a second wooden spoon from the crock in the corner, and they set about whipping the paste until the butter turned a pale yellow. 

“You’re not adding the flour yet?” she asked. The recipe hadn’t specified the order, but it had been written for those with even the meagerest experience in a kitchen, and Cullen doubted Elodie had been afforded that even before she had been taken to the Circle.

“If you add the flour too early, the dough will be tough,” he explained. “You can’t over-stir it.”

“For someone who hasn’t baked since he was a child, you seem very at home here.”

_Home_. This was the scent that had been hanging in the air down by the stable, the faint memory that slowed his steps just long enough for him to hear her curses. Now that it was under his nose, it felt natural, a peaceful tug from a bygone era, before his world had ended and long before he had begun rebuilding it stone by stone. It was missing something, though; it was too bland, just out of reach.

Elodie picked up a heart-shaped cookie cutter and twirled it around her finger as he poured the flour into their bowls.

“Did you ever observe Kissing Day?” she asked. “When you lived in Kirkwall?”

“ _No._ ”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No, I didn’t-” He huffed, returning her fluster with more fluster. “I didn’t mean- It just wasn’t the right time. The people I knew there, even the friends, it wasn’t that kind of… It was too much. It’s a very busy time in Kirkwall; the streets are full with tourists and residents alike. It’s _loud_. Everyone is _out there,_ and there’s so much to watch, I just-”

“Alright,” she said, and he sensed it in her voice, the placating tone, the hint of uneasiness that proved it was safer to give the easy answer. 

Calloused fingertips brushed against his bare knuckles, curling under his palm with a gentle squeeze.

“I’m sorry,” she said. The disquiet was gone. Perhaps he had imagined it, or perhaps she had deserved more than a second to process his ramblings before he lost faith. Her palm was hot against his skin, lingering long enough for him to wonder if she was waiting for him to speak. 

“I’m alright.”

She squeezed again and let go.

“So,” she drawled, her elbows locked as she leaned over the table, glaring into her bowl, “what exactly is the _correct_ amount of stirring?”

“When I was little, my mother had us use our hands. Just reach in there and squeeze it until you have dough.”

“Your bare hands?” Her nose wrinkled at the thought, but there was glee in her eyes.

“Our bare hands.”

The laces of his cuffs, normally tucked up under his gloves, dangled freely down the side of the bowl. He untied them, rolling his sleeves as high as they would go, his hands eager, if not outright excited for the forgotten sensation of cool, velvety flour and gritty butter paste. Just as he was about to dive in, her hand was on him again, her fingers wrapping lightly around his forearm as if she had just recalled something vital. Her thumb stole a stroke through the curls of hair there, slow enough to leave him questioning if it was an accident, brazen enough that, had he not spent the last five months watching her embrace every third person she met, he might not have questioned it at all.

“Nutmeg!” she said. “It’s Rook’s favorite. Can we add it?”

“Of course.”

He unhooked the grater from over their heads while she dug through half a dozen spice jars lining the far wall looking for the one containing the dark bulbs.

“Do you know what they look like?” he asked.

“I’m an herbalist.”

“Right. Sorry.”

She gave the jar a victorious rattle when she found it, popping the lid open and taking the grater from his hand. 

“Tell me when,” she said.

Bright, woody, spicy. There was no build up to the aroma; it went from nowhere to everywhere in an instant as the dark shavings fell into his bowl. It was the missing piece, the crack in the handle of his mother’s kettle, the huff from Mia as she dragged baby Rosalie away from the fire for the tenth time, Branson’s hiss when he took a cookie before it was cool. He braced for the guilt, but the fire was crackling and Elodie was smiling and the sharp spice opened his lungs and the wave never came.

“More?” she asked, her hand stalled and uncertain over the bowl.

“No more. That’s enough.”

“Cullen, are you sure you’re alright?”

His lips twitched up at her concern.

“I am.”

She eyed him for a moment, and then rolled her eyes at his smirk. 

Once their dough was combined, they sprinkled flour onto their work surface and rolled them out. They had only the one cookie cutter between them, and Elodie suggested Rook’s batch be given heart shapes while she would content herself with simple circles, but Cullen assured her this was nonsense.

“You did not spend all morning sweating in a kitchen to settle for an inferior cookie,” he said. “The lady shall have her hearts.” 

Another touch on the arm, this time a playful tap of admonishment. His lungs expanded, clear and strong, with each rapid breath of spice he drew. She refused to catch his eye.

Rather than wait for the cookie cutter, he began forming the hearts by knife, which took considerably more concentration than he had anticipated. By the time Elodie had finished all of hers and set her tray to baking, he refused to avail himself of the cookie cutter out of sheer determination. 

“I want to thank you,” she said, dusting the flour off her her workspace and hopping up to sit on the table next to him. “We obviously never celebrated anything like this in the Circle, and I’d been looking forward to it, but then we got word that Hawke’s friend was in Crestwood and it looked like we’d have to leave. I signed myself up for this thinking it would only be an hour or so, and I was so frustrated when you found me. I don’t know how much you heard.”

“Enough,” he laughed, the momentary distraction creating an asymmetrical bubble on the heart he was carving. “ _Damn everything_.”

“What a relief,” she giggled. “I was _almost_ mortified.”

Flames licked at his ears, impressively pointed for the hearth being on the other side of the room. 

“Anyway,” she continued. “Thank you for staying. This has been… worth it.”

He fought the urge to glance up at her and lost, nicking the pad of his thumb the second his eyes left the dough. Blood pounded through his chest, spurting perhaps more than it would have had he not lost control of his pulse. She started at his hiss and hopped down to dig through her pocket.

“I’m beginning to think you might not agree,” she mumbled, crushing an elfroot leaf between her hands before wrapping its remnants around his thumb.

“Agree?” A tingle spread through his palm, the relief granted him the clarity to remember what she had said. “Oh, I- I do. It is.”

_Just_ say _it. Say_ something _._ The urging was clear, but whether a nudge or a plea, he wasn’t interested in parsing it further. Not on Kissing Day, when everyone wanted someone and nothing was real.

“Good,” she said. She was still holding his hand, tapping the leaf at various points around his thumb. Such a small cut was almost certainly closed, or closed enough to have stopped the bleeding, but the tapping was grounding and the repetitive arc her thumb stroked across his palm was _more_ , and if not for the accursed holiday, he might just have blurted it all out. 

“I think your cookies are done,” he said instead, his voice sand in his throat. A wan grin flickered across her face as she pulled away and removed her tray from the heat, but it was quickly replaced by triumph.

“It worked!” she cried. “We made cookies!”

“Congratulations.”

“They still don’t look right. I think they need icing.”

“If you like. They’ll have to cool first.”

“Do you have time?”

“For you? Always.”

Her sudden laughter nearly made him lose control of his knife again, so he decided she would have to be satisfied with ten heartish blobs and began filling his tray for baking.

Elodie insisted that the icing have at least two colors: white and red. His mother had created artful little cakes for town festivals using an icing made of sugar, cream, and egg whites, but without the recipe he was certain he wouldn’t be able to duplicate it. They would have to content themselves with some combination of butter, sugar, and cream, experimenting with Elodie’s suggestion of beet juice to add color to half of it.

After half an hour of trial and error, they had achieved something sweet and edible and not entirely unlike icing. By then, his own cookies were fully baked and cooling on the counter while they set about smearing the pasty red concoction over Rook’s perfectly shaped hearts.

“What’s the white for, exactly?” he asked.

“Decoration.”

“It’s all for decoration.”

“Decorations for the decoration, then. We’ve gotten this far, I’m not going to start skimping now.”

He wasn’t entirely certain what that meant, but this was the first holiday in years that he had celebrated in any tangible way, even if accidentally, and that would not remain true once he returned to his office, so he put up no resistance. Her time at Skyhold was running short anyway, and work would still be waiting for him when she was gone. 

“We need a…” She snapped her fingers, trying to recall the word. “A thing. A thing to make the loops.” Another snap. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I wish I did.”

“The thing you use to draw lines.”

“Ambitious. My mother just used folded paper. I don’t remember much about how she folded it, but if you can find some paper you could give it a try.”

She was searching through the cooks’ cache before he had even finished his sentence, giving a victorious yelp when she found the paper. While she muddled around with various ways to fold it into a tight, sturdy cone, he finished icing the remainder of her brother’s hearts before starting in on his own.

Years working with children in the greenhouse had made her resourceful, and before long she was waving a small, empty cone proudly through the air. It took some effort to keep the seam closed, but once the icing was stuffed and the top rolled down, she had a passably functional tool. Inhaling courage, she leaned into her “loops.”

“Maker’s breath,” she muttered, almost immediately. When he looked up, she shielded the cookie she was working on with a curved hand. “Don’t look!”

“I’m sure it isn’t that bad.”

“I can’t afford for the Inquisition to lose faith in my steady hand,” she laughed. “Maybe it’s better that these remain between my brother and me.”

His were hardly looking better, and he hadn’t even attempted piping yet. The heartish blobs were now quite blobbier, and crusted with a dark, gritty icing paste.

“Did your brother do anything for you?” he asked. 

“Maker, yes. I’m constantly in a gift debt to him, and it’s plain that this will not be the thing to catch me up. He left a sackful of handknit winter gear at my door this morning: a hat, mitts, a cowl, and a note letting me know that the socks will be finished by next week. I can’t compete with that.”

“I doubt he considers it a competition.”

“Of course he doesn’t. Somehow I think that’s worse.”

Anyone who spoke with Rook knew he worshipped his sister. Gentle and difficult to rattle, his ruddy face purpled with fluster the second anyone questioned Elodie’s abilities. His loyalty was familiar, another reminder of Cullen’s own loose ends, including the note currently tucked under a week’s worth of field reports, an admonishment for not letting his siblings know sooner that he had survived Haven. 

“Did you want the piping on your cookies, too?” he asked. 

“Only if you were really looking forward to giving it a try. It’s a bit of a nightmare actually. A little tip from me to you, six letters is the firm cap, five if the letters won’t cooperate.”

“You’re writing?”

“Well, it seemed simple enough to write his name. The letters are a bit curly, but I’m told it’s the thought that counts. But then I tried to write “best” and “brother” on two separate cookies, and, well…”

She pushed one of the hearts across the table at him, taking care to continue shielding the rest. The reddish icing had been admirably smoothed, but he understood what she meant by “curly,” and she had only managed to fit “BROTH” across the widest portion. He covered his mouth, masking his chuckle behind a cough.

“Yuck it up, Rutherford,” she said, slapping the conical packet of white icing down in front of him. “You try.”

“Alright. What would you have me write?”

“Baker’s choice.”

He chose the heartiest of the ten, both in thickness and shape, and glared down at it as if it could reveal its purpose to him. If he was going to say something, this seemed like the perfect opportunity, the only gift he’d ever made across the eight Kissing Days he had experienced, but he hadn’t prepared for it, hadn’t foreseen this turn and was still uncertain he wanted to take advantage of it. Beads of sweat clustered at his temples, but Elodie had moved on to organizing her brother’s cookies neatly on their tray and thankfully did not note his agony. In the end, he settled on her name. It was more intimate than his usual form of address for her, but it wasn’t pushy, and perhaps most importantly, it would fit. 

The ‘E’ came out an unreadable series of curly loops that taught him speed was more important than accuracy. The rest of her name was legible, if childish. When she saw it, she grinned and turned back to her plate, removing a cookie from the top and setting it down before him.

“Cullen” was written across the widest part, about as clearly as her name was written on his: a jagged, loopy ‘C’ followed by awkward script. 

“It was the first one I made. I should have practiced first,” she said with a rueful shrug.

“No, I- It’s per-” His fingers twisted the cookie back and forth as he cast about for an appropriate response. “Thank you.”

“Cullen, I want-”

The door behind him creaked open without ceremony, ushering the cook and half a dozen assistants in from the cold. Elodie bit her lip and collected her plate as they swept through, clearing the center table in one fell swoop. Cullen gathered the remaining cookies in the sack they had set aside for her travel batch and retreated to the corner to armor himself.

Tuts of disapproval puffed around the room as the cook and her apprentice assessed the damage. Elodie offered to help clean it up, but was openly derided and shooed toward the door. Her mouth was drawn in an apologetic frown, but the laugh lines were back at the corners of her eyes as she approached him and offered to help with his buckles so they could escape the cook’s disapproval faster.

“I thought your brother gave you a hat,” he said as she shuddered beside him on the stair. The sun had risen fully above the keep’s walls, but tucked beneath the main tower and the ramparts, the stable’s alcove was still much frostier than the cozy warmth of the kitchen.

“I left it in my quarters. I used the interior door to the kitchen, so I didn’t think I needed it.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

Her steps slowed to a stop on the bottom stair and he turned to face her.

“Thank you again,” she said. “For the help. And the cookie. I imagine you didn’t wake up this morning expecting to be my Kissing Day hero.”

His own cookie rested delicately in his open palm, a final, glaring reminder to say something, anything. A chill breeze rustled the curls that the hearth’s heat had loosened from the knot at the back of her head, and she tugged one behind her ear as she watched him, waiting.

“I, um,” he stammered. “Stay safe. On the road. Come back to us.”

She grinned, shaking her head and tapping his hand one last time. Through the leather of his glove, it was a duller touch than the others, a parting touch. His pinkie twitched in a fleeting moment of bravery, an attempt to return the squeeze, but before he could catch them, her fingers had moved to his mantle, grasping a handful of the fur there.

Even on the step, she had to dance up on her tiptoes to reach him. Shifting her plate of cookies to the side, she leaned up, head cocked to the side as if to catch his cheek. His pulse crashed in his ears, but could not prevent him from leaning in. Halfway there, she stopped.

“May I?” she whispered.

Not trusting his voice, he nodded.

She landed just to the left of his lips, feather light and chaste as snow. For a long moment, he dared not move, wrestling with the urge to take her sweet face in his hands and kiss her properly. Ever merciful, she waited there, barely breathing until he was under control enough to press his own lips to her floured cheek. She held him there through another beat of silence.

When her fingers finally released him, her face was pink with chagrin. She cleared her throat.

“Don’t, um,” she said, touching her cheek with frozen fingers. “Don’t let the holiday get you down.”

And then she left.

The courtyard around him buzzed. Red ribbons dotted the crowd; the day’s festivities had begun, but as far as he could tell no one had noticed the Commander and the Herald tucked away in their corner. His fingers curled tenderly around the cookie in his hand, the scent of home and nutmeg and _her_ faintly clinging to his mantle. A shopkeeper waved at him as he stepped into the light.

“Would you like to buy a rose for a special someone today, Commander?” she asked in a thick Orlesian accent.

He shook his head, giving the cookie a gentle bob. 

“Not today,” he said, and shuffled up to his office. 


End file.
